President Biden should have begun Thursday night’s State of the Union address by apologizing to the American people for the harm he has caused to the country. Instead, he yelled at the American people for over an hour in a speech filled with America-last rhetoric for his liberal base, in what was clearly a de facto kickoff speech for his campaign.
President Biden led off his address with a call to borrow and send tens of billions more taxpayer dollars to Ukraine. This tone-deaf approach of prioritizing people thousands of miles across the ocean ignores the top two concerns on the American people’s minds — inflation and illegal immigration.
In fact, it took President Biden more than 40 minutes to address the crisis on our border and the resulting deadly crime and drug addictions associated with it. When we did finally hear about Laken Riley, the president seemed to confuse her with a college football coach. Sadly, this brutal murder was a completely preventable crime committed by another illegal immigrant. Just last week, we learned that a 14-year-old girl in my district was sexually assaulted by a 32-year-old illegal immigrant released into the country last fall by the Biden administration. The cable pundits on MSNBC may not think border crime has reached Virginia, but this is not the first case, and it will not be the last.
President Biden wants Americans to forget that when he took office, the border was more secure than at any time in recent history. By intentionally reversing President Trump’s border policies, President Biden invited 10 million illegal immigrants into our country. Now his strategy is to deflect and distract from his willful culpability for the crisis he created, by somehow claiming that he doesn’t have the authority to reverse his executive actions. He is calling on Congress to act, but the Republican House majority has acted by passing H.R. 2 nearly a year ago, the strongest genuine border security bill in history.
President Biden should acknowledge his failures, reverse course, use his authority to reinstate the Trump administration policies that were working and demand that the Democratic-controlled Senate pass H.R. 2 and send it to his desk for his signature.
In the meantime, one of the few groups doing well in the Biden economy is the Mexican crime cartels, which are profiting to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars each year from drugs and human trafficking. But for regular Americans, inflation has skyrocketed by 18 percent since Biden took office. The average American family is paying about $1,000 more per month for the essentials than they were paying before Biden took office. President Biden may not have to go to the grocery store, pay rent, pay utility bills or put gas in his car, but the people in the 5th District of Virginia do, and they are feeling the pain of Bidenomics. And no, mandating expensive and impractical electric vehicles to solve supposed climate change is not going to make their lives better.
In 2020, President Biden promised the American people an administration based on competence, decency and unity. Biden cannot run on that message in 2024. He botched the Afghanistan withdrawal, created the disaster at the border, passed an Inflation Reduction Act he later admitted did nothing to reduce inflation, put an emphasis on racially divisive “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI) across the federal government, undermined the military for woke purposes, called for radical abortion on demand policies, defended men in girls’ sports, supported transgender surgeries at taxpayer expense, undermined Second Amendment rights, attempted to use the legal system to destroy his political rival and used the Justice Department to target parents and people of faith.
When combined with evidence the Biden family traded on his name to enrich themselves and a special counsel report raising questions about his cognitive abilities, should we be surprised the president has doubled down to appeal to his base in a desperate effort to win reelection?
As expected, President Biden took no ownership for his failures as the leader of our nation during the State of the Union address. Instead, he tried to create a villain to blame it on —MAGA Republicans. Yet, as Biden stood there giving what will hopefully be his final State of the Union address, he did not fool anyone. The facts point to who is failing the American people — it is Joe Biden.
Bob Good represents Virginia’s 5th District and serves on the Education and Labor Committee and the Budget Committee. He is a member of the House Freedom Caucus.